Some of us always said it: Grexit was an incredible threat

Well, it was really never on the table, as some of us have been shouting from the rooftops for years now.

Back in May 2011, I was writing here that the whole idea of expelling Greece from the Eurozone was based on “an incredible treat”; on “…a flagrant lie”. “Greece” I insisted, “cannot be pushed out of the euro without the euro collapsing in short order.” The utility of issuing such a threat was, I suggested, “to exact from the Greek polity many pounds of flesh, by which to impress Northern Europe’s despondent electorates that Greece deserves another huge, expensive loan. As is so often the case with naked blackmailing, an incredible threat is pressed into the service of an ill-conceived goal: To the issuing of a fresh gargantuan loan to an insolvent country that neither needs nor wants…